Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

‘You know, I think —’ she said, making a decorous little bow.

At this the groups began to disintegrate. Asta looked glum and sullen, but said little. She heard Cigarette saying to Mothmar Acord:

‘Do I go home with you or do you come home with me?’

Acord seemed to go into a little sieep while he made calculations. Then he pointed a forefinger at Catchy and said:

‘_You_ are coming home with me .’

Catchy nodded, and they linked arms.

‘Nobody loves me,’ said Cigarette, more tragically than she had wanted to sound.

‘Oh, but I do,’ said Wensday, stroking her neck. Then he saw that Avril, who had been watching him, was hooking her chin over the shoulder of Tobit Osbert, who was drowsily drunk. ‘But I’m a respectable married man,’ Wensday added, going to the side of his wife and taking her hand in a grip which was nieant to appear affectionate and intended to hurt.

Hate had got into the atmosphere. Everyone wanted to go away and, in quiet quarrels, say unforgivable things to near and dear ones. Mothmar Acord gave Asta a hand like a rubber glove full of cold water. Cigarette insisted on kissing her. Mrs Scripture caught at her hand and then dropped it as if she had picked up somebody else’s soiled handkerchief. Titch Whitbread, still smiling with pure delight, cautiously squeezed her fingers in his gentle, mighty hand, and swore eternal friendship. Soon everyone was gone but Schiff. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.

‘Your friend Amy Dory,’ he said in a throaty whisper. ‘So another boy friend! Also Hemmeridge; also Osbert; also Soskin; also Roget; also Milton Catt; also Strindberg; also Mothmar Acord. Ha-ha! No more Tobit Osbert, eh?’

‘Oh, go away!’ said Asta Thundersley.

‘A good sedative, take,’ said Schiff.

‘Go to hell, Schiff — be a good fellow.’

‘Why not? Good night till now.’

‘Good night , Schiff!’

‘You will be seeing me.’

He left the house. Asta kicked the sittingroom door shut and turned and looked about her. Everywhere there floated and sank dust and ashes in the dregs of sticky glasses, and the place was disgusting with stale tobacco smoke. Two cigarettes had burnt themselves out on the mantelpiece. Another had been surreptitiously extinguished upon an oval silver frame that surrounded a photograph of Thea Olivia when she was young and pretty. One of the guests had pocketed a leaf-shaped jade ashtray. The ashtray was worth less than ten shillings, yet Asta was deeply and bitterly hurt. If whoever it was had said: ‘I like it,’ she would have replied: ‘Do, please, take it.’ But, no. People must pilfer — guests, invited in good faith!

She was sick to death of everybody in the world; sick and tired.

Asta took hold of a blue-and-white Chinese vase, and raised it high, intending to throw it with a great smash into the fireplace. Two cigarette-ends and a shower of ashes came out of the neck of it and ran into her armpit. At the same time something sizzled behind the sofa. She put down the vase and looked for the source of the noise. Mr Pink was asleep on the floor.

She looked at him in a white rage, grasped the vase again and, after a little deliberation, angrily put a soft cushion under his head and with a whispered damn-and-blast covered him with a tigerskin rug.

The rain was pouring down. ‘God, what am I to do?’ said Asta Thundersley.

But if, at that moment, the Voice of God had answered: ‘_What are you to do about what, my daughter?_’ she would have found nothing to say in reply — only that she was unhappy because of the badness of men and women, and that her heart was sore at the imperfection of this rough, unfinished world.

Thea Olivia came in elegant and decorous in a pink-flowered black dressinggown that covered her from white throat to roseembroidered slippers.

‘_Good_ night, my dear,’ she began to say; but stopped with a gasp in the middle of the second word, shocked by the spectacle of big red Asta weeping as noisily as a dog drinks, into a little blue handkerchief.

‘Darling! What is it?’

‘Leave me alone, Tot — do leave me alone. I’ve got the miseries …’

‘Let me get you —’

‘I ask you … leave me alone,’ said Asta, crying like a schoolboy.

Thea Olivia went to her bedroom.

38

It was her habit punctiliously to wash her handkerchief before she went to bed, and to hang it up to dry for a meticulous ironing next day, or the day after. She was worried about her handkerchief. What a fool she had been, to give way to impulse and use it as a duster on the turn-up of a trouser-leg! Thea Olivia let warm water run into the hand-basin in her bedroom, and cautiously opened her handkerchief.

She was horrified and disgusted.

In the folds of the cambric was a gritty blackness.

Exploring this grit with her delicate finger-tips, and smelling it with one fine nostril, she recognized it.

It was coal dust.

Such stuff was ruin to cambric, destruction to delicate fabric of any kind. What madness had taken possession of her, that she had gone down with only one handkerchief — a Good Handkerchief designed for dabbing, instead of a Bad Handkerchief into which one might blow?

She bathed, rather than rinsed, that handkerchief. The blackness trickled away. The cambric, held against the light, was unpunctured.

Thea Olivia was profoundly relieved. She squeezed the handkerchief very tenderly, and hung it to dry on the towel rail. There were not many squares of cambric like that left in this cottony, shoddy world. Thea Olivia loved little, exquisite things, and the more fragile they were the better she loved them. It was impossible for her to go to sleep if she had not first arranged, by the side of her bed, one flower in a precious vase of Chinese porcelain which a hearty sneeze might have blown to fragments. Also, she carried with her an extra-special tea-set. It was over a hundred years old. You would have been reluctant to pick up the saucer: it looked as though it might bruise like the petal of a camellia. It was possible, in the right light and at the right angle, to read a newspaper through the side of the cup. Cup, saucer, diminutive plate, tiny tea-pot, hot-water pot, milkjug (which you might have fitted into your left ear) and sugarbasin, all stood in order upon a silver tray as thin as paper. Cities had been demolished, great grey stone cathedrals had been cracked like hazel nuts, an empire had fallen, and still Tot’s little tea-set remained, unchipped, uncracked, serenely preserved like her virginity. When she travelled she wrapped it in so many layers of wadding and tissue-paper that — together with her little tortoise-shell tea caddy and miniature silver kettle and spirit lamp — it occupied twelve cubic feet of space.

Before she could think of composing herself for sleep, every. thing had to be in its right place.

Thea Olivia took off part of the crowning glory that was her hair, shook it out, brushed it, and put it carefully aside. A patterned vase on the mantelpiece offended her — it had been turned so that the visible part of the pattern did not match that of the vase on the other side. She readjusted this. A little rug was disarranged. She rearranged it. She did not touch the window, because she was convinced that she would find dust on the frame. The fire, she reassured herself, had settled down to a respectable dying glow, and the room was comfortably warm. Thea Olivia looked once more towards the jewellery she had taken off before she washed her handkerchief. She never moved a mile without a quaint little pale porcelain hand, mounted in a whimsical porcelain saucer: on the fingers of this little hand she always hung her rings, arranging her bracelets and brooches below.